Jeffrey D. Sadow is an associate professor of political science at Louisiana State University Shreveport. If you're an elected official, political operative or anyone else upset at his views, don't go bothering LSUS or LSU System officials about that because these are his own views solely.
This publishes five days weekly with the exception of 7 holidays. Also check out his Louisiana Legislature Log especially during legislative sessions (in "Louisiana Politics Blog Roll" below).

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23.10.14

Readers interested in Louisiana
politics got another reminder recently of the maddening inconsistency of state
Treasurer John
Kennedy’s thinking, and why, should he decide to pursue the matter, any
attempt he makes to be elected governor in 2015 should be greeted with a
healthy dose of skepticism.

Sometimes on issues he hits the
nail square on the head, as he did recently concerning a hastily-considered law
that had the effect of expanding substantially state retirement benefits for
two individuals. He correctly understood that the law
passed unconstitutionally and that legal action should be taken to have the
courts invalidate it. Further, he continually agitated for that until, in
effect, that
was the outcome.

But on other issues at times he
goes into full demagoguery mode that shreds facts bound by illogical inferences.
He displayed that recently in an opinion
piece concerning the changes
coming in the state’s employee and retiree (and for some school employees)
health benefits. Generally, while some will see these lowered, many clients
will see higher insurance costs when taking all of premiums, co-payments, and
deductibles into account as a result of those changes.

22.10.14

Human nature dictates that we
often don’t recognize qualitative change at its very beginning, but only when
observing the obviousness of it as it near completion. Depending on outcome, the
Public
Service Commission District 5 contest, with north Louisiana as its entire
battlefield, could serve as the latter.

That features as its incumbent
the last of Louisiana’s significant populists, Democrat Foster Campbell. He started his
political career during the second gubernatorial administration of Prisoner #03128-095,
who currently is running for Congress under his given name Edwin Edwards, with election to
the state Senate. While entirely different in personal comportment, one thing
they do share is Manichean political rhetoric, blaming the state’s problems on
the alleged ability of certain bogeymen to get too much power and wealth at
the expense of the larger public, necessitating redistributive policy to right
the reputed wrong.

21.10.14

Voters on both Caddo and Bossier
Parishes, but especially the latter, face some Trojan Horse proposals that
likely will raise their taxes come late this year and early next year if they
approve these.

In both parishes, a new 2 percent
tax would be levied on hotel rooms and camping sites, with proceeds going to
the Shreveport-Bossier Convention
and Tourist Bureau’s Sports Commission to attract sports events, the Independence Bowl Foundation for it
to beef up payouts for the bowl game and to get Division I schools to play
neutral site games at Independence Stadium, and essentially to subsidize Shreveport Regional Airport so that it
can pay carriers to provide added service. It is estimated it would bring in
over $2 million a year.

As usual, supporters argue this
only can bring benefits to the area because “others” will be paying the extra
fee, not area residents. And, just as typically, this ignores that the added
cost to lodging will discourage. So maybe bribing events, teams, and airlines
might get more of them to come to the area – only then to jack up lodging costs
for teams, fans, and other area visitors that drives up their lodging costs, which
serves as a disincentive to want to come. There’s no evidence to suggest that
the cost of lost jobs and negative spillover effects on local businesses by an
artificial increase in lodging prices will be less than any presumed gains from
increased visitation on the tax coffers of local governments.

20.10.14

So the state lost track of around
$320 million starting in 2002, and it’s out there available to be spent.
Whether that means the state won’t need to reduce services over the next few
months is another matter.

By Aug. 15, the state knows its
funds inflows and outflows from the previous fiscal year ending Jun. 30, and
reports these results in early October. Part of the revenue side of the picture
is money taken from dedicated funds transferred to another agency for use and
self-generated monies by agencies assigned to specified uses. But apparently
since 2002 if any excesses existed after transfers or generation, unused for
their intended purposes, they lay fallow. Now the Gov. Bobby
Jindal Administration wishes to put them to work, especially as without
those leftovers fiscal year 2014 resulted in about $141.5 million of outflows
over inflows.

19.10.14

As expected, the Louisiana
Supreme Court flushed
home the slam dunk on the state’s 2012 revolutionary education reforms, and
having resolved that leads to the next question of how to progress further in
improving education in the state.

Last week, the Court essentially
laughed away a challenge to the law. Its reforms addressed a number of
different facets about education, and the suit was based upon the very fact of
diversity in the law. Having already
warned an obstinate lower court judge that the law should not be taken to
violate the single object constitutional standard for legislation, only to have
him stubbornly insist that it did, the Court conclusively decided otherwise
unanimously. The legal tactic by the plaintiffs, a motley collection of
American Federation of Teachers state and local units, was a cover to try to
cancel policy they didn’t like, most controversially for them making teacher
tenure more difficult to attain and basing that decision for about 35 percent
of all teachers on a value-added measure anchored on standardized testing.

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